Is there any software to resize ReFS partition?

Question

_{Saturday, January 2, 2016 1:03 AM}

Is there any software to resize ReFS partition?

I use Windows 10 64bit now.

All replies (6)

_{Saturday, January 2, 2016 6:57 PM ✅Answered}

Not sure how you got a ReFS partition on Windows 10, option only appears on Server 2012 for me. Looking under Disk Management have Extend and that worked ok. Selecting Shrink get a message 'The volume cannot be shrunk because the file system does not support it.'. So if you are trying to expand \ extend the partition then use Disk Management. If you want to shrink it then can only think to copy all the date off and delete the partition and create it again.

_{Wednesday, January 6, 2016 9:21 PM ✅Answered}

Well can you explain what you are trying to achieve perhaps? In my test being a Virtual Disk I can add space to the disk that shows on the end of the same disk as unallocated space and I could extend the disk onto that.

What format does the ReFS disk take? I notice in Resilient File System Overview

"ReFS is available on client operating systems

In Windows 8.1, you have the option to format a storage space as ReFS using mirrored Storage Spaces in Control Panel. ReFS also supports alternate data streams (up to 128K for both Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2), which enables Office document thumbnails, Mark of the Web (MOTW), and similar features available on Windows 8.1."

So is this part of a storage space? As a test I have setup a two disk mirror in storage spaces and formatted it as ReFS. I can expand it (having not allocated all capacity to it to begin with) but do not get an option to reduce it size.

_{Sunday, September 9, 2018 11:38 PM | 5 votes}

What does it matter what they're trying to achieve?
They asked a question... 

"Is there any software to resize ReFS partition?"

Now the answer is either going to be "yes - there's X, Y, and Z" or "no"

Now I came here to see if I could find where someone had shrunk a ReFS volume. 

But once again, rather than an answer that could be meaningful, I find "snark" - "Why do you want this possibly useful tool?" What does it matter??? They have their reasons.  You might find them frivolous or silly, but they have their reasons.  I have mine.  I came here searching for an answer - not someone trying to determine whether the OP's reason was sufficient for their providing an answer.

Here's my reason: I have one that was created and is taking up an entire 8TB partition - I wanted to shrink that to 2TB, and add two other drives for RAID-5 mirroring.  (I have <400G to move to it right now, so there's PLENTY of room.)  I'm already going to have to go through the RAID setup and spend hours waiting for that to complete; I didn't want to start out by having ReFS first have to go through the whole thing AGAIN.  

So you have my reason.

Now... Is there a way?

As I don't want to wait, and haven't found an answer elsewhere, I'm going to just repartition/reformat from scratch... but don't you feel it MIGHT just be a good idea if there was an answer to the question, perhaps?

_{Thursday, December 6, 2018 2:20 PM}

my thoughts exactly!

_{Monday, December 31, 2018 5:33 PM}

Jeff do you leave a trail of salt where ever you go? Second thread i have seen you on where its just a rant. If someone asking for more information seems like snark, you haven't worked around many netops/secops people have you?

As for OP's question. You should only expand ReFS, it has data duplication and block level operations that would make reclaiming space problematic. Also for Windows 10 I would recommend working with  in the confines of the "Storage Spaces" management interface in the settings menu.

For more info see. 

 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview

_{Saturday, March 9, 2019 11:56 PM | 2 votes}

You do realize that NTFS perfectly well supports shrinking with data deduplication and other functionality enabled, right? It's just that microsoft hasn't yet implemented shrink support? There's no technical reason why. Deduplication and whatnot are not blockers to this issue. 

As to jeff, his answer was spot on - who cares *why* the question was asked, the answer is obvoius - it's just not supported right now, and we can't yet find any 3rd party applications that will allow it. Plain and simple, no salt required. 

I came here due to the need to shrink an ReFS partition too, but as there's yet stilll not a valid answer, I'm going to have to attach an additional 20 drives to the system in order to recreate and migrate the storage space to the reduced size it needs to be, then remove each drive one at a time via powershell. What a waste!

For windows 10, i'd reccomend working in the confines of powershell and disregarding the UI, as 99% of the time it doesn't expose supported features that MS support will tell you to use. Technet documentation often delves into features/settings that are not present in the UI but fully supported. 

For the record, i'd think that any "salt" you think coming from Jeff is merely being shocked and confounded at the stuff that gets "marked as answer" on this forum when it either completely avoids the question or doesn't answer it at all.